Will Fred Thompson Withdraw The Troops?

By Ezra

If you've any doubt of the type of campaign Fred Thompson wants to run, open the Wall Street Journal this morning and read the Law & Order actor's op-ed "Case Closed: Tax cuts mean growth."

Despite the atmospherics, he's not pretending to be an economist here (and a good thing, too). He's pretending to be Reagan. The article starts off with the folksy, funny opener, "It's that time again, and I was thinking of the old joke about paying your taxes with a smile. The punch line is that the IRS doesn't accept smiles. They want your money." Thompson, it turns out, doesn't want to give it to them. Better yet, he's prepared to explain why they shouldn't get it.

"Treasury statistics show that tax revenues have soared and the budget deficit has been shrinking faster than even the optimists projected," writes Thompson, or one of his aides. "Since the first tax cuts were passed, when I was in the Senate, the budget deficit has been cut in half...at this rate, the budget will be in surplus by 2010."

None of that, of course, is true. The budget deficit created by the tax cuts has eased, but you need only glance at this graph of the deficit to see the Republican record on red ink. See that plummeting line? That's when Thompson was in the Senate. And the administration's budget projections that Thompson is using assume that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will, come 2010, cost zero dollars, Medicare and Medicaid will endure $100 billion in cuts, SCHIP won't be fully funded, and the AMT will be preserved. That made sense for the Bush administration to say, of course, because all those decisions would be made when they were out of office. But all of those decisions will have to be made when Thompson is hoping to be in office. And so some enterprising political reporter should ask him about this article. The questions, in order, should be:

1. Do you mean to suggest you will withdraw all troops, civil servants, government-funded contractors, and other cost-drivers from Iraq and Afghanistan by 2010?
2. Are you going to cut Medicare and Medicaid by $100 billion over the next five years and, if so, where will you make your cuts?
3. Do you think the Children's Health Insurance Program should be fully funded?
4. Are you willing to preserve the AMT in its current form and on its current schedule?

The answers, I think, will be rather illuminating.